If you've spent any time in gentrified Brooklyn lately, you've surely noticed a certain theme developing in what might be called "urban atavistic" restaurants, a sort of Brooklyn-by-gaslight aesthetic. Parlors, waistcoats, snuff boxes, and tie tacks have lined up like Lucky Charms; every new restaurant is at least 20% salvaged from the beams of some building that was once filled with dumbwaiters and people who started sentences with the words “I dare say.”
Frank Castronovo (of Frankies 457, Prime Meats, and the upcoming Delightful Coffee Shop) has a beard, is not a Luddite, and defines his style as “pre-industrial revolution tactics with food.” That Preindustrial Revolution now continues with Coffee Peddlar, the Frankies’ teamup with Stumptown, which (according to Eater) went into previews yesterday in the recently vacated Margaret Palca Bakes, seen here in late January. 210 Court Street in Cobble Hill will soon be a destination for Stumptown, sacher/linzer tortes, and strudels in the style of an old Vienna coffeehouse. Expect Freud to stop by soon to tell everyone what it all means; he had a beard too.
And over in Park Slope, another new coffee parlor— a branch of Cafe Grumpy — will soon open on 7th Avenue (between 11th and 12th), and will not specialize in schadenfreude, despite the name.
